[imagesource: Reddit]

Danny Boyle’s upcoming zombie movie, 28 Years Later, was shot over the summer using only a bunch of adapted iPhone 15s, making the Hollywood thriller, with its budget of $75 million, the biggest movie to date filmed with smartphones.

28 Years Later is the follow-up to the hugely successful 28 Days Later, with Cillian Murphy, and the Robert Carlysle-led sequel 28 Weeks Later.

The original 2002 movie was described as genre-defining and was the first to portray zombies as scary fast rather than lumbering corpses, ala Walking Dead. It remains one of the greatest zombie movies ever made.

Set one month after The Rage Virus caused the complete collapse of civilisation in the UK, the post-apocalyptic survival thriller follows bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) after he wakes up from a coma and tries to make sense of the end of the world.

Written by Alex Garland (The Beach, Civil War), the threequel might also see the return of Murphy, although there are no details yet on the plot for 28 Years Later, or whether Murphy stars in all three movies of the upcoming trilogy.

Boyle is joined by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle for the latest instalment. The pair won Oscars together in 2009 for their hit Slumdog Millionaire. Mantle was also a cinematographer on the original 28 Days Later, as well as Boyle’s films Trance (2013), T2 Trainspotting (2017), and 127 Hours (2010).

The pair’s kick-off movie, 28 Days Later, was filmed with an innovative-for-the-time digital camera – one of the first Hollywood feature films shot with a Canon XL-1. For the latest horror treat though, Boyle relied entirely on iPhone 15s – not even the latest phone.

Several people involved in the film confirmed to WIRED that the primary camera system used in 28 Years Later was an iPhone 15 Pro Max and apparently, Boyle and Mantle couldn’t obtain the latest iPhone 16 series since filming began too early.

Several arthouse films have previously been shot with iPhones, including Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) and the Steven Soderbergh drama Unsane (2018).

We can’t wait, and in case you forgot how terrifying the previous instalment was, here’s a bloody reminder.

[source:wired]